Phyllis Airhart tracks the denomination’s path from birth to glory days and beyond
| May 8, 2025
In June 2015, Broadview’s predecessor publication, The United Church Observer, published an essay titled, “Do We Still Believe That Something Vital Is in the Making?” The occasion was the United Church’s 90th anniversary, and the writer was Phyllis Airhart, author of A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (2014). Today, Airhart is professor emerita of the history of Christianity at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto. To mark the United Church’s centennial this month, she collaborated with Broadview to reformat and update her original piece. We begin with her provocative opening salvo.
The United Church of Canada’s ‘death wish’
Does The United Church of Canada have a death wish? Has that question ever crossed your mind as you stewed over unflattering comments about one of its controversial positions? Is this a church that is willing and even wanting to die for its convictions?
If a reporter had put that question to some of the thousands leaving the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto on June 10, 1925, they might well have answered yes. Much of the publicity for the event had billed it as the birth of The United Church of Canada. The sermon they heard that day, however, was a sombre reminder that discipleship demands sacrifice and sometimes even death.
Read whole story at https://broadview.org/united-church-historian-facing-future-with-faith/
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